Space Leap of Faith

Space Leap of Faith

On Sunday, skydiver Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a high-altitude balloon and plummeted 40 kilometers back to Earth. I wanted to watch it live but missed it due to an appointment I had to keep. I heard it was heart-pounding, and Twitter went nuts over it. I wish I had seen it!

Still, my feelings on it are mixed. While I really am glad it got people excited, I couldn't shake the feeling it wasn't more than a stunt. A cool stunt, but a stunt. It was plugged as a way to learn more about spacesuits and all that, but I had my doubts. Having it sponsored by a sugary caffeinated energy drink marketed to teens also made me a bit wary.

Phil Plait writes Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangelizer, and author of Death From the Skies!

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I was thinking of writing something up about it, but then my friend and space historian Amy Shira Teitel wrote an excellent piece crystallizing my thoughts, so go read her article for more in that vein (which is also mirrored on Discover Magazine's blog The Crux).

But what I really wanted to write about was this image I saw around Twitter and Facebook:

Why do I want to write about this? Because, in a nutshell, it's everything wrong about attitudes on our space program. If I sound a little peeved, I am. Here's why.

This meme was started in a tweet by revulv. I suspect it was just a joke, and to be honest it's funny enough; I smirked when I read it. But someone took that joke and added the picture, and then it got spread around. And I can tell by the comments I'm seeing people really think it's true - this idea has been around since the Shuttle retired, and it's unfair. It's simply not true.
First, as Amy points out in her post, Baumgartner's jump was a record breaker, but he wasn't in space. Our atmosphere thins out with height, and doesn't really have an edge where air ends and vacuum begins. Because of this, there's an arbitrarily agreed-upon height where we say space "starts" - it's called the Kármán line, and it's 100 km (62 miles) above sea level. Baumgartner was less than half that high. When I talked about his jump I used the phrase "edge of space", which is probably fair. He was in a pretty good vacuum by ground standards, but in space itself he was not.

Second, he wasn't in orbit. A lot of folks confuse being in orbit and being in space, which is understandable. When we say something is in space that means it's just higher than that arbitrary limit. You can get there via rocket by going straight up 100 km and then back down, for example. That's a suborbital flight.

But being in orbit is different. An orbit is where you are free-falling around the Earth. Think of it this way: in orbit the Earth is pulling you down to the surface, but you're going fast enough sideways that you never actually hit (to paraphrase Douglas Adams: orbiting is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss). Your velocity down and your velocity to the side add together to give you a circular (or elliptical) path.

Baumgartner used a balloon to go straight up. He wasn't in orbit.

And that's two of the three things that bother me about that meme picture: he wasn't in space, and he wasn't in orbit, two things the US has rockets that can do.

Now, some people will point out that in fact the US cannot do that, at least not with people. We don't have any rockets rated for human flight into space.

That's true, but brings up my third point, the most important, what a lot of people don't seem to get: you need to add the words "right now" to the end of that sentence.

We can't launch humans into space right now. But in just a few years we'll have that ability. In spades.

Both SpaceX and ATK think they'll be ready to take people into orbit in 2015. Virgin Galactic and XCORR may be ready to do commercial suborbital flights before that date. [Note added after posting: I want to be clear; these are not NASA programs, but some have contracts with NASA, and I'm talking about the US as a nation, not necessarily as a government space program.]

The Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. We're in the middle of what's planned to be a five year gap where the US can't take humans into space. Mind you, when the Apollo program shut down there was a nine year gap before we had a program to take humans to space again (with the exception of a few Saturn flights to orbit for Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz mission; even then there was a six year gap until the Shuttle launches began).

My point? Things aren't nearly as bad as people think. Yes, the Shuttle is retired, but to be brutally honest, while it's an amazing machine, it could not nor would it ever be capable of taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit. It also cost way more than promised, and couldn't launch as often as promised. I've made this point before, and it's one we need to remember. Getting to space is not easy, and if we want to do it we have to do it right.

And let's not forget we are still throwing rovers at Mars, probes at Jupiter, and one satellite after another into Earth orbit. We're still going into space, if by proxy. Humans won't have to wait much longer.

We need to learn from the past and keep our eyes on the future. By looking at the past we can see by comparison things are not so bad right now; we're just in a lull before the storm. We'll soon have not just the capability to put humans in space, but many capabilities to do it! Space travel will be easier and cheaper than it ever has been since the dawn of the Space Age.

My goal is to see nothing less than the permanent colonization of space by human beings, and I strongly suspect we are not that far from achieving it.

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